Justin's Linklog Posts

• Don’t waste your time in crappy startup jobs : 7 reasons why working for a startup sucks. Been there, done that — I wish I’d read this years ago. It should be permalinked at the top of Hacker News. “In 1995, a lot of talented young people went into large corporations because they saw no other option in the private sector– when, in fact, there were credible alternatives, startups being a great option. In 2012, a lot of young talent is going into startups for the same reason: a belief that it’s the only legitimate work opportunity for top talent, and that their careers are likely to stagnate if they work in more established businesses. They’re wrong, I think, and this mistaken belief allows them to be taken advantage of. The typical equity offer for a software engineer is dismally short of what he’s giving up in terms of reduced salary, and the career path offered by startups is not always what it’s made out to be. For all this, I don’t intend to argue that people shouldn’t join startups. If the offer’s good, and the job looks interesting, it’s worth trying out. I just don’t think that the current, unconditional “startups are awesome!” mentality serves us well. It’s not good for any of us, because there’s no tyrant worse than a peer selling himself short, and right now there are a lot of great people selling themselves very short for a shot at the “startup experience” — whatever that is.”
  (tags: startups work job life career tech vc companies pay stock share-options)

• Sean Sherlock to science researchers: “see ya! don’t let the door hit you on the way out” : “In relation to the possibility of losing skilled people overseas, any vibrant research ecosystem will see an ebb and flow of capable people in the scientific fields – in some ways this is a good thing, as experience gained abroad has the potential to benefit Ireland in the future. The latest SFI data shows that SFI supports approximately 3,000 researchers, including some 2,000 postgraduate students and post-doctorals — a figure that has remained relatively stable for some time.” NICE
  (tags: sean-sherlock jobs ireland science research)

• ‘You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?’ : Brilliant responses to this stereotypically-annoying Google interview question: “Since being shrunk down like this is impossible, I can only assume this is happening inside a dream or nightmare of some kind. I sit down and meditate, summoning up my Siddartha/Neo like mental powers and realise that there is no blender, and that this terrible dream was created by the ego of a sadistic Google employee. As the kundalini fire races up my spine, and my spirit is liberated, I open my third eye and bathe said Google employee in the light of love. I forgive him, for he knows not what he does.”
  (tags: funny interviewing google blenders reddit)

• Pretty Penny : Importing the good old Dutch Omafiets lady’s bike to Dublin, EUR269 each. that’s a great price for a solid bike!
  (tags: bikes cycling dublin fashion omafiets dutch)

• SSTable and Log Structured Storage: LevelDB : good writeup of LevelDB’s native storage formats; the Sorted String Table (SSTable), Log Structured Merge Trees, and Snappy compression
  (tags: leveldb nosql data storage disk persistence google)

• Joyent Services Back After 8 Day Outage : Lest we forget. I think it was 10 days in total once everything was resolved
  (tags: joyent outages bingodisk strongspace cloud solaris zfs)

• A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods : interesting categorisation, and some crazy visualisations I’ve not encountered before (via Aileen)
  (tags: dataviz visualization information design ui via:aileen)

• Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant : “They had a great lead, they were years ahead. And they completely blew it. And they completely blew it because of the bureaucracy.”
  (tags: microsoft bureaucracy stack-ranking hr culture)

• Facts still sacred despite Ireland’s spectrum of conflicting views on abortion – The Irish Times – Fri, Jun 29, 2012 : Very good data-driven analysis. “Pro-life” groups claim abortion is a serious mental health risk for women. Youth Defence claims women who opt for an abortion rather than carrying to term or giving the baby up for adoption suffer mental maladies such as depression, suicide and other problems. But this is at heart a scientific claim, and can thus be tested. […] Psychologist Dr Brenda Majors studied this in depth and found no evidence that [“post-abortion syndrome”] exists. As long as a woman was not depressive before an abortion, “elective abortion of an unintended pregnancy does not pose a risk to mental health”. The same results were found in several other studies […] Essentially these studies found there was no difference in mental health between those who opted for abortion and those who carried to term. Curiously, there was a markedly increased risk to mental health for women who gave a child up for adoption. A corollary of the research was that while women did not suffer long-term mental health effects due to abortion, short-term guilt and sadness was far more likely if the women had a background where abortion was viewed negatively or their decisions were decried — the kind of attitude fostered by “pro-life” activists.”
  (tags: pro-choice pro-life abortion data facts via:irish-times research science pregnancy depression pas)

• “Machine Learning That Matters” [paper, PDF] : Great paper. This point particularly resonates: “It is easy to sit in your o?ce and run a Weka algorithm on a data set you downloaded from the web. It is very hard to identify a problem for which machine learning may o?er a solution, determine what data should be collected, select or extract relevant features, choose an appropriate learning method, select an evaluation method, interpret the results, involve domain experts, publicize the results to the relevant scienti?c community, persuade users to adopt the technique, and (only then) to truly have made a di?erence (see Figure 1). An ML researcher might well feel fatigued or daunted just contemplating this list of activities. However, each one is a necessary component of any research program that seeks to have a real impact on the world outside of machine learning.”
  (tags: machine-learning ml software data real-world algorithms)

• Massive identity-theft breach in South Korea results in calls for national ID system to be abandoned : In South Korea, web users are required to provide their national ID number for “virtually every type of Internet activity, not only for encrypted communications like e-commerce, online banking and e-government services but also casual tasks like e-mail and blogging”, apparently in an attempt to “curb cyber-bullying”. The result is obvious — those ID numbers being collected in giant databases at companies like “SK Communications, which runs top social networking service Cyworld and search site Nate”, and those giant databases being tasty targets for black-hats. Now: “In Korea’s biggest-ever case of data theft the recent hacking attack at SK Communications, which runs top social networking service Cyworld and search site Nate, breached 35 million accounts, a mind-boggling total for a country that has about 50 million people and an economically-active population of 25 million. The compromised information includes names, passwords, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and most alarmingly, resident registration numbers, the country’s equivalent to social security numbers.” This is an identity-fraudster’s dream: “In the hands of criminals, resident registration numbers could become master keys that open every door, allowing them to construct an entire identity based on the quality and breadth of data involved.”
  (tags: south-korea identity fraud identity-theft web bullying authentication hacking)

• WeatherSpark : Beatiful dataviz of weather data from met.no, NOAA.gov, World Weather Online and Weather Central. The main graph includes: mean and percentiles of historical temperature data for time of year, the temperature and precipitation forecast over the chosen period, wind direction and speed, with hourly data. Very nicely done! (via Una Mullally)
  (tags: via:unamullally dataviz temperature forecasts weather graphing percentiles wind rain)

• the recruiter honeypot : wow, I thought it was hard hiring in Dublin. Sounds like Silicon Valley is insane. “Unfortunately, it’s not all about the numbers. Though external recruiters perform well for start-ups, there’s another side to this story. It pains me to write this but I think it’s important to share. Meebo employed lots of external recruiters when we were getting off the ground. We had standard 18-month no-poach restrictions with all of our contractors that specified that those recruiters were not allowed to contact Meebo employees within 18 months of our contract expiring. Most of those contracts expired in 2008-2009. However, every recruiter and firm we’d worked with who was still in the recruiting business tried to poach [the ‘honeypot’ employee] Pete London.” (Another lesson: don’t build a product in javascript, since it’s impossible to hire engineers ;)
  (tags: honeypots hiring silicon-valley recruiting coding experts meebo)

• CEO Of Internet Provider Sonic.net: We Delete User Logs After Two Weeks. Your Internet Provider Should, Too. – Forbes : “what we saw was a shift towards customers being made part of a business model that involved–I don’t know if extortion is the right word–but embarassment for gain. An individual would download a movie, using bittorrent, and infringe copyright. And that might be our customer, like Bob Smith who owns a Sonic.net account, or it might be their spouse, or it might be their child. Or it might be one of his three roommates in a loft in San Francisco, who Bob is not responsible for, and who rent out their loft on AirBnB and have couch surfers and buddies from college and so on and open Wifi. When lawyers asked us for these users’ information, some of our customers I spoke with said “Oh yeah, crap, they caught me,” and were willing to admit they engaged in piracy and pay a settlement. But in other cases, it turned out the roommate did it, or no one would admit to doing it. But they would pay the settlement anyway. Because no one wants to be named in the public record in a case from So-And-So Productions vs. 1,600 names including Bob Smith for downloading a film called “Don’t Tell My Wife I B—F—— The Babysitter.” AG: Is that a real title? DJ: Yes. I’ve read about cases where a lawyer was doing this for the movie “The Expendables,” and 5% of people settled. So then he switched to representing someone with an embarassing porn title, and like 30% of people paid. It seemed like half the time, the customer wasn’t the one right one, but they rolled over because it would be very embarassing. And I think that’s an abuse of process. I was unwilling to become part of that business model. In many cases the lawyers never pursued the case, and it was all bluster. But under that threat, you pay.”
  (tags: interview isps freedom copyright internet shakedown lawyers sonic.net data-retention via:oisin)

• an ex-RBSG engineer on the NatWest/RBS/UlsterBank IT fiasco : ‘Turning over your systems support staff in a wave of redundancies is not the best way to manage the transfer of knowledge. Not everyone who worked the batch at [Royal Bank of Scotland Group] even knew what it is they knew; how, then, could they explain it to people who didn’t know there was knowledge to acquire? Outsourcing the work from Edinburgh to Aberdeen and sacking the staff would have exposed them to the same risks. […] I Y2K tested one of the batch feeder systems at RBS from 1997 – 1998, and managed acceptance testing in payments processing systems from 1999 – 2001. I was one of the people who watched over the first batch of the millennium instead of going to a party. I was part of the project that moved the National Westminster batch onto the RBS software without a single failure. I haven’t worked for the bank for five years, and I am surprised at how personally affronted I am that they let that batch fail. But I shouldn’t be. Protectiveness of the batch was the defining characteristic of our community. We were proud of how well that complex structure of disparate components hummed along. It was a thing of beauty, of art and craft, and they dropped it all over the floor.’
  (tags: systems ops support maintainance legacy ca-7 banking rbs natwest ulster-bank fail outsourcing)

• Some Facts & Insights Into The Whole Discussion Of ‘Ethics’ And Music Business Models | Techdirt : David “Camper Van Beethoven” Lowery’s blogpost about music sales, ethics, piracy etc. looks like it was pretty much riddled with errors regarding the viability of the music business, then and now. Empirical figures from Jeff Price from Tunecore, and others, to debunk it: “‘Well here’s some truth about the old industry that David somehow misses. Previously, artists were not rolling in money. Most were not allowed into the system by the gatekeepers. Of those that were allowed on the major labels, over 98% of them failed. Yes, 98%?. Of the 2% that succeeded, less than a half percent of those ever got paid a band royalty from the sale of recorded music. How in the world is an artist making at least something, no matter how small, worse than 99% of the world’s unsigned artists making nothing and of the 1% signed, less than a half a percent of them ever making a single band royalty ever?'” […] “Another example of Lowery being wrong that Price responds to is the claim that recorded music revenue to artists has been going down. Price has data: ‘This is empirically false. Revenue to labels has collapsed. Revenue to artists has gone up with more artists making more money now than at any time in history, off of the sale of pre-recorded music. Taken a step further, a $17.98 list price CD earned a band $1.40 as a band royalty that they only got if they were recouped (over 99% of bands never recouped). If an artist sells just two songs for $0.99 on iTunes via TuneCore, they gross $1.40. If they sell an album for $9.99 on iTunes via TuneCore, they gross $7.00. This is an INCREASE of over 700% in revenue to artists for recorded music sales.'”
  (tags: music mp3 music-business piracy techdirt david-lowery tunecore)

• Eight Real Tales of Learning Computer Science as a High School Girl : ‘All students at Stuyvesant High School are required to take a year of computer science. As it turns out, the advanced computer science classes skew mostly male anyway. But for a year, boys and girls get exposed to computer programming together. We asked Mike Zamansky, the head of the computer science program, to share some stories from his female students. They did us one better. Eight students sent in first-hand accounts of what it’s like to learn computer programming as a teenage girl.’ Some interesting comments here. This topic is weighing on my mind now that I have two girls…
  (tags: schools learning education computer-science technology nyc girls teenage)

• RBS collapse details revealed – The Register : as noted in the gossip last week. ‘The main batch scheduling software used by RBS is CA-7, said one source, a former RBS employee who left the company recently.’ ‘RBS do use CA-7 and do update all accounts overnight on a mainframe via thousands of batch jobs scheduled by CA-7 … Backing out of a failed update to CA-7 really ought to have been a trivial matter for experienced operations and systems programming staff, especially if they knew that an update had been made. That this was not the case tends to imply that the criticisms of the policy to “offshore” also hold some water.’
  (tags: outsourcing failure software rbs natwest ulster-bank ulster-blank offshoring downsizing ca-7 upgrades)

• Natwest, RBS: When will bank glitch be fixed? Probably not today • The Register Forums : Some amazing insider-info posts on the Reg forum for the gigantic RBS/NatWest/Ulster Bank multi-day outage. Fingers pointing at their outsourcing/downsizing practices — in a word, they’ve sacked the experienced staff, replaced them with noobs thousands of miles away, and not paid down any technical debt on the legacy code they’re maintaining. Classic legacy IT fail. “I worked for RBS during and after the merger with Natwest, I left their Global Financial Markets Department in 2004 after a 5 year stint. They had already moved some IT functions to India at that point and have continued to do so year on year since. The numbers some people are quoting 1600/800 are possibly the more recent figures, the total is way way beyond this. The comments on documentation are comical, as if a document is the thing you turn to at a time of crisis. The fact is, when you work closely with systems and the business users, you understand not only the quirks of the systems, but the risks and consequences of failure. You work with those users on the work around solutions that will get the banking day complete. They haven’t just outsourced the IT staff, but the very experienced and valuable back office / operations staff that would work with IT staff to solve the serious issues. I beleive these guys are mostly posted out in Singapore, who probably have never met the IT staff in India. The unseen cost of outsourcing is a compounding loss of shared experience and commitment, which becomes accutely apparent when the sh!t hits the … cash machines The chaps I trained out in India were nice enough, but they simply lacked the knowledge and experience of Finacial Markets trading, trade and settlement processing, Swift messaging blah blah and the risks involved. I’ll be drinking with a bunch of ex RBS/Natwesties soon enough, where we’ll all be saying….. “WE TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!” Another poster says: “I understand that your description of the RBS Mainframe based batch update process is fairly accurate. The source of the problem was a software update to Batch scheduling suite CA7. The upgrade when so well that now there is no schedule to run all of those thousands of batch jobs to receive and make BACS payments, update balance, schedule printouts, etc. I am sure the problem with the CA7 upgrade and the unfortunate misplacing of the Batch schedule has absolutely nothing to do the with the last UK based technicians leaving recently. The guys in India of course are perfectly able to cope and fix their mistake. I’m sure they understand how the thousands of jobs in the schedule need to ordered to make sure there is data corruption or loss. After all the problem happened on Tuesday and it’s only Friday. I wonder how many ex-RBS staff have received very lucrative short term contracts in the last few days……”
  (tags: natwest it rbs the-register outsourcing fail organisations ulster-bank ulster-blank)

• the VIM clutch : ‘VIM Clutch is a hardware pedal for improved text editing speed for users of the magnificent VIM text editor. When the pedal is pressed down, the pedal types “i” causing VIM to go into Insert Mode. When released, it types and you are back in Normal Mode.’ (via Andrew Delaney)
  (tags: via:delaney vim programming ui pedals vi modal foot-switch)

• Irish “Millennials” post more negative reviews than anyone else : ‘Millennials are more negative when it comes to product sentiment. They give more 1-star reviews than Gen X or Boomers; the most negative Millennials in our analysis hail from Ireland, where 12% of them give products 1- or 2-star ratings.’ Previously, we tended not to complain — not any more, it seems
  (tags: ireland complaints whinging generations ratings reviews via:jim-carroll studies behaviour online opinions)

• VIDEO: Drone ‘spies’ on Mountjoy, and the Facebook and Google offices · The Daily Edge : TheJournal coverage of that drones-over-the-Aras video. some truly demented comments fearing for “intellectual property”, somehow
  (tags: the-journal drones video youtube ireland privacy)

• “Finding the k shortest paths”, D. Eppstein, 1994 [paper] : 35th IEEE Symp. Foundations of Comp. Sci., Santa Fe, 1994, pp. 154-165. This paper presents an algorithm that finds multiple short paths connecting two terminals in a graph (allowing repeated vertices and edges in the paths) in constant time per path after a preprocessing stage dominated by a single-source shortest path computation. The paths it finds are the k shortest in the graph, where k is a parameter given as input to the algorithm. Time complexity: O(E*log V + L*k*log k) time (L is path length)
  (tags: k-shortest-paths graph algorithms sparse-graphs)

• “K* : A Directed On-The-Fly Algorithm for Finding the k Shortest Paths”, Husain Aljazzar and Stefan Leue, 2008 : “We present a new algorithm, called K*, for ?nding the k shortest paths between a designated pair of vertices in a given directed weighted graph. Compared to Eppstein’s algorithm, which is the most prominent algorithm for solving this problem, K* has two advantages. First, K* performs on-the-?y, which means that it does not require the graph to be explicitly available and stored in main memory. Portions of the graph will be generated as needed. Second, K* is a directed algorithm which enables the use of heuristic functions to guide the search. This leads to signi?cant improvements in the memory and runtime demands for many practical problem instances. We prove the correctness of K* and show that it maintains a worst-case runtime complexity of O(m+k n log(k n)) and a space complexity of O(k n + m), where n is the number of vertices and m is the number of edges of the graph. We provide experimental results which illustrate the scalability of the algorithm.”
  (tags: graphs k-shortest-paths algorithms papers)

• Floyd–Warshall algorithm – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia : “a graph analysis algorithm for finding shortest paths in a weighted graph (with positive or negative edge weights)”.
  (tags: graphs algorithms k-shortest-paths)

• Scram : noun: an emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor. It has been defined as an acronym for “Safety Control Rod Axe Man”, due to this story from Norman Hilberry: “When I showed up on the balcony on that December 2, 1942 afternoon [at the Chicago Pile, the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear reactor], I was ushered to the balcony rail, handed a well sharpened fireman’s ax and told, “if the safety rods fail to operate, cut that manila rope.” The safety rods, needless to say, worked, the rope was not cut… I don’t believe I have ever felt quite as foolish as I did then. …I did not get the SCRAM [Safety Control Rod Axe Man] story until many years after the fact. Then one day one of my fellows who had been on Zinn’s construction crew called me Mr. Scram.”
  (tags: scram nuclear reactor history etymology words shutdown emergency wikipedia 1942 science acronyms)

• South Lake Union Eats : holy moly, that’s a lot of food trucks (SLU is the district hosting Amazon’s Seattle campus)
  (tags: food food-trucks seattle restaurants slu amazon)

• A Closer Look: Email-Based Malware Attacks : ‘The average detection rate for these samples was 24.47 percent, while the median detection rate was just 19 percent.’ That is *atrocious*. (via Tony Finch)
  (tags: via:fanf fail malware filtering av smtp email viruses)

• LOITERING THEATRE – YouTube : ‘An excerpt from LOITERING THEATRE by Caroline Campbell and Nina McGowan – a film exploring forbidden and inaccessible space in Dublin through flying drones equipped with cameras.’ Mountjoy Prison and Aras an Uachtairain, notably
  (tags: dublin forbidden exploration urban-exploration loitering youtube video film ireland drones hack-the-city science-gallery)

• The Hydra Bay : “How to set up a Pirate Bay proxy”. Step-by-step instructions for MacOS and Linux on how to run a fully-functional reverse proxy for The Pirate Bay — in other words, provide a duplicate URL for users to circumvent ISP blocks of TPB. http://about.piratereverse.info/proxy/list.html contains about a hundred others. See also http://unblockedpiratebay.com/ for a standalone PHP script which does the same (albeit a little less efficiently). A good demonstration of how futile filtering techniques like IP or domain name blocks are, when applied to a popular website like TPB.
  (tags: piratebay filtering censorship copyright php proxies reverse-proxies ip-blocking dns-blocking)

• how to restore from iCloud backup : the trick: don’t try and do it through iTunes, it won’t give you the option, apparently. I have a carrier unlock, and apparently need to wipe the phone for it to take place; this scares the crap out of me
  (tags: backup iphone restore sysadmin phones icloud apple howto)

• Jim FitzPatrick’s Pinterest account : *the* Jim FitzPatrick — he of the legendary iconic 1968 Che Guevara image. “All is free to share, I only go after those who use/misuse/exploit my artwork for profit. Have fun.” I particularly like http://pinterest.com/pin/46302702389391106/ ;)
  (tags: jim-fitzpatrick open-source sopa acta ireland copyright)

• Issue of web access raises hackles at conference – The Irish Times – Tue, Jun 19, 2012 : ‘Prof Michael O’Flaherty, the vice-chairman of the UN Human Rights Committee, told the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) conference on internet freedom that the rights of copyright holders to make a living had to be balanced with the right to freedom of expression.’ ‘THE PUNISHMENT for breakers of the “three strikes” illegal download rule was “exceptionally disproportionate” […] The internet was a vehicle for a wide range of human rights so excluding someone from it was an “extraordinary penalty”.’
  (tags: osce coverage unhrc conferences dublin copyright freedom internet censorship filtering)

• The story of St. Columba: A modern copyright battle in sixth century Ireland : a good summary of the roots of copyright, the Columcille “To every cow belongs its calf; to every book its copy” story (via TJ McIntyre)
  (tags: columcille copyright history ireland columbanus books)

• PGP founder, Navy SEALs uncloak encrypted comms biz • The Register : ‘The company, called Silent Circle, will launch later this year, when $20 a month will buy you encrypted email, text messages, phone calls, and videoconferencing in a package that looks to be strong enough to have the NSA seriously worried. Zimmermann says that surveillance by the state and others has increased vastly over the last few years, and privacy improvement are again needed. “At the very least I want people, as part of their right in a free society to be able to communicate securely,” he said in a promotional video. “I should be able to whisper in your ear, even if your ear is a thousand miles away.” […] While software can handle most of the work, there still needs to be a small backend of servers to handle traffic. The company surveyed the state of privacy laws around the world and found that the top three choices were Switzerland, Iceland, and Canada, so they went for the one within driving distance.’
  (tags: pgp phil-zimmermann privacy crypto silent-circle apps vc security)

• The Silencing of Maya : software patent shakedown threatens to remove a 4-year-old’s only means of verbal expression: ‘Maya can speak to us, clearly, for the first time in her life. We are hanging on her every word. We’ve learned that she loves talking about the days of the week, is weirdly interested in the weather, and likes to pretend that her toy princesses are driving the bus to school (sometimes) and to work (other times). This app has not only allowed her to communicate her needs, but her thoughts as well. It’s given us the gift of getting to know our child on a totally different level. I’ve been so busy embracing this new reality and celebrating, that I kind of forgot that there was an ongoing lawsuit, until last Monday. When Speak for Yourself was removed from the iTunes store.’
  (tags: speak-for-yourself children law swpats patenting stories ipad apps)

• _Building High-level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning_ [paper, PDF] : “We consider the problem of building highlevel, class-specific feature detectors from only unlabeled data. For example, is it possible to learn a face detector using only unlabeled images using unlabeled images? To answer this, we train a 9-layered locally connected sparse autoencoder with pooling and local contrast normalization on a large dataset of images (the model has 1 billion connections, the dataset has 10 million 200×200 pixel images downloaded from the Internet). We train this network using model parallelism and asynchronous SGD on a cluster with 1,000 machines (16,000 cores) for three days. Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not. Control experiments show that this feature detector is robust not only to translation but also to scaling and out-of-plane rotation. We also ?nd that the same network is sensitive to other high-level concepts such as cat faces and human bodies. Starting with these learned features, we trained our network to obtain 15.8% accuracy in recognizing 20,000 object categories from ImageNet, a leap of 70% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art.”
  (tags: algorithms machine-learning neural-networks sgd labelling training unlabelled-learning google research papers pdf)

• I’ve been playing the same game of Civilization II for almost 10 years. This is the result. : Epic Reddit post. “Parallels to ‘1984’ off the top of my head: 3 superpowers, a “communist” leadership in which technology has reached as far as it needs to go (end of technology tree), barbarian (resistance) uprisings constantly being stomped out by the totalitarian government, nuclear war rendering most farmland useless, constant breaking and reassembling of treaties between the 3 superpowers, seemingly infinite war (due to the previous point), an ever present and all knowing leader making the decisions of the nation…” (via oceanclub)
  (tags: via:oceanclub gaming games civ sid-meier 1984 politics war future strategy)

• Wrapping parties around a tight budget – The Irish Times – Tue, Jun 12, 2012 : “On the birthday present front, Crowley was shocked when she totted up her family’s spending for six months and realised she was spending more on gifts than on clothes for her entire family. A few 40th birthdays aside, she says the majority of the outlay is on gifts for her children’s friends.” A lot of familiar names in this story ;)
  (tags: gifts money prices dublin friends irish-times)

• Many Niches » Blog Archive » On Working At Amazon : (catching up on old posts) good article from a recent hire, discussing some unusual aspects of the corporate culture
  (tags: amazon culture work)

• Analyzing Flame’s MD5 Collision Attack [slides, PDF] : really detailed slide deck by Alex Sotirov, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Trail of Bits, Inc. (via Tony Finch) Plenty of security fail by MS, and also: PKI is clearly too hard
  (tags: via:fanf flame security malware md5 collisions hashing pki tls ssl microsoft)

• Copyfraud – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia : ‘a term coined by Jason Mazzone (Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School) to describe situations where individuals and institutions illegally claim copyright ownership of the public domain and other breaches of copyright law with little or no oversight by authorities or legal consequence for their actions.’ Good term (via Nelson)
  (tags: copyright rights ip fraud copyfraud wikipedia words terminology neologisms dmca infringement)

• Copyright Review Committee Submission : ‘This site is intended to give the public a chance to comment on, and hopefully [collaboratively] improve, the text of a proposed submission to the [Irish] Copyright Review Commission.’ (ie. CRC2012, deadline 31 May.)
  (tags: crc2012 copyright ireland law collaboration)

• Dropwizard : ‘a Java framework for developing ops-friendly, high-performance, RESTful web services. Developed by Yammer to power their JVM-based backend services, Dropwizard pulls together stable, mature libraries from the Java ecosystem into a simple, lightweight package that lets you focus on getting things done. Dropwizard has out-of-the-box support for sophisticated configuration, application metrics, logging, operational tools, and much more, allowing you and your team to ship a production-quality HTTP+JSON web service in the shortest time possible.’ From Coda Hale/Yammer; includes Guava, Jetty, Jersey, Jackson, Metrics, slf4j. Pretty good baseline to start any new Java service with….
  (tags: framework http java rest web jersey guava jackson jetty json web-services yammer)

• satellite rescue abandoned due to patents : ‘SES and Lockheed Martin explored ways to attempt to bring the functioning [AMC-14] satellite into its correct orbital position, and subsequently began attempting to move the satellite into geosynchronous orbit by means of a lunar flyby (as done a decade earlier with HGS-1). In April 2008, it was announced that this had been abandoned after it was discovered that Boeing held a patent on the trajectory that would be required. At the time, a lawsuit was ongoing between SES and Boeing, and Boeing refused to allow the trajectory to be used unless SES dropped its case.’ In. credible. http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Boeing_Patent_Shuts_Down_AMC_14_Lunar_Flyby_Salvage_Attempt_999.html notes ‘Industry sources have told SpaceDaily that the patent is regarded as legal “trite”, as basic physics has been rebranded as a “process”, and that the patent wouldn’t stand up to any significant level of court scrutiny and was only registered at the time as “the patent office was incompetent when it came to space matters”‘, but still — who’d want to go up in court against Boeing?
  (tags: boeing space patenting via:hn funny sad lockheed-martin ses amc-14 business-process patents)

• Nikola Tesla Wasn’t God And Thomas Edison Wasn’t The Devil : Correcting some egregious misconceptions about an Oatmeal comic regarding Tesla and Edison — explaining some realities about invention, scientific progress, and the history of electricity. “I’d contend that nearly every invention in the engineering or sciences is an improvement on what has come before – such as Tesla’s improvements to alternating current. That’s what innovation is. It’s a social process that occurs in a social context. As Robert Heinlein once said, “When railroading time comes you can railroad — but not before.” In other words, inventions are made in the context of scientific and engineering understanding. Individuals move things forward – some faster than others – but in the end, the most intelligent person in the world can’t invent the light bulb if the foundation isn’t there.”
  (tags: nikola-tesla history electricity innovation invention progress science thomas-edison the-oatmeal)

• Jamming Tripoli: Inside Moammar Gadhafi’s Secret Surveillance Network : The very scary future of state control, censorship, and totalitarianism in the age of the internet. A presentation from Amesys, a subsidiary of Bull S.A. “explained the significance of Eagle to a government seeking to control activities inside its borders. Warning of an “increasing need of high-level intelligence in the constant struggle against criminals and terrorism,” the document touted Eagle’s ability to capture bulk Internet traffic passing through conventional, satellite, and mobile phone networks, and then to store that data in a filterable and searchable database. This database, in turn, could be integrated with other sources of intelligence, such as phone recordings, allowing security personnel to pick through audio and data from a given person all at once, in real time or by historical time stamp. In other words, instead of choosing targets and monitoring them, officials could simply sweep up everything, sort it by time and target, and then browse through it later at their leisure. The title of the presentation — ”From Lawful to Massive Interception” — gestured at the vast difference between so-called lawful intercept (traditional law enforcement surveillance based on warrants for specific phone numbers or IP addresses) and what Amesys was offering.”
  (tags: massive-interception future state-control censorship privacy internet email totalitarianism libya amesys bull-sa gadhafi surveillance)

• The Walton Bridge petition : ‘IOP Ireland is campaigning to have the new bridge across the Liffey in Dublin at Marlborough Street named for ETS Walton – Ireland’s only physics Nobel prizewinner.’
  (tags: nobel physics science ireland ernest-walton scientists history naming dublin tcd)

• zen.org Communal Weblog » Digital Legacy : Elana Kehoe on dealing with Brendan’s digital legacy: “What to do when you are next of kin to a geek?” A lot of good advice here, and plenty of things I need to think about…
  (tags: brendan-kehoe digital-legacy wills legacy passwords accounts tips)

• Pickstarter : ‘A curated blog of notable Kickstarter projects’ (via potentato)
  (tags: via:potentato blogs kickstarter funding links projects)

• Digital Rights Forum – Online Privacy : ‘The Digital Rights Forum is a public debate on the important issues surrounding digital rights, with each event designed around the general over-arching topic of digital rights, puls a more narrowly focused subject. On Friday, the 18th of May, the forum will tackle the issue of Online Privacy. With our lives ever more integrated with the web and social media, staying safe online is becoming an increasing concern to everyone. From mobile apps to websites and email, protecting our personal information and online privacy has never been more complicated and more important. Faced with software vulnerabilities such as contacts being leaked onto the Internet by mobile application providers, the increasing push toward revealing more private and personal information on social networks, and attempts by some to protect their businesses through litigation or processes which require the disclosure of personal information, the modern digital landscape has made protecting one’s privacy more difficult than ever before. With this in mind, this Digital Rights Forum will discuss the current state of data protection and online privacy in the current context of social networks and mobile applications.’ Featuring Billy Hawkes (the DPC, no less!), and Devore from Boards.
  (tags: dpc digital-rights ireland politics online security privacy data-protection)

• Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers – YouTube : ‘some portions of the experience, such as the sky, may be replaced by personalised advertising.’ Uploading your consciousness in the age of copyright maximalism, as Nelson Minar put it (via Nelson)
  (tags: via:nelson grim-meathook-future future singularity funny copyright advertising)

• An IDE is not enough : Very thought-provoking response to that ‘Light Table’ demo which went round the aggregators a couple of weeks back. ‘The fundamental reason IDEs have dead-ended is that they are constrained by the syntax and semantics of our programming languages. Our programming languages were all designed to be used with a text editor. It is therefore not surprising that our IDEs amount to tarted-up text editors. Likewise our programming languages were all designed with an imperative semantics that efficiently matches the hardware but defies static visualization. Indeed it would be a miracle if we could slap a new IDE on top of an old language and magically alter its syntactic and semantic assumptions. I don’t believe in miracles. Languages and IDEs have co-evolved and neither can change without the other also changing. That is why three years ago I put aside my IDE work to focus on language design. Getting rid of imperative semantics is one of the goals. Another is getting rid of source text files (as well as ASTs, which carry all the baggage of a textual encoding minus the readability). This has turned out to be really really hard. And lonely – no one wants to even talk about these crazy ideas. Nevertheless I firmly believe that so long as we are programming in decendants of assembly language we will continue to program in descendants of text editors.’ (via Chris Horn)
  (tags: via:cjhorn ide programming coding programming-languages semantics syntax source-code text)

• Open Data Structures : A free-as-in-speech as well as -beer textbook of data structures, covering a great range, including some I hadn’t heard of before. Here’s the full list: ArrayStack, FastArrayStack, ArrayQueue, ArrayDeque, DualArrayDeque, RootishArrayStack, SLList, DLList, SEList, SkiplistSSet, SkiplistList, ChainedHashTable, LinearHashTable, BinaryTree, BinarySearchTree, Treap, ScapegoatTree, RedBlackTree, BinaryHeap, MeldableHeap, AdjacencyMatrix, AdjacencyLists, BinaryTrie, XFastTrie, and YFastTrie
  (tags: algorithms books data-structures computer-science coding tries skiplists arrays queues heap trees graphs hashtables)

• Chronon DVR for Java : “record entire execution of your Java app; play it back on any machine”. Other features: time-travelling debugger — step backwards, jump to any point in execution, designed for long running programs; post-execution logging — add log statements after the program has run, and see what it would have logged. Looks extremely nifty, but I wonder how big those recording files get…
  (tags: debugging via:peakscale eclipse chronon dvr java coding logging jvm)

Reminder to Dublin-based readers — next week, Amazon (my employers) will be putting on Under the Hood at Amazon, billed as ‘A night of Beer, Pizza and Cloud Computing for Software Developers’. I’ll be speaking at it.

It’s partially a recruiting event, but even if you’re not looking for a new job, please come along. It’s also useful for us to talk about some details of what we’ve been doing in Dublin, since we’ve been operating to date with a pretty low profile, and in reality there’s some very interesting stuff going on here… particularly the product I’ll be talking about, naturally.

Also, there’ll be free beer and some Kindles to be won ;)

It’s next Thursday night, in our offices in Kilmainham. More info on this Facebook page.

• FF Chartwell : OpenType font to display charts/graphs using ligatures. ‘Designed by Travis Kochel, FF Chartwell is a typeface for creating simple graphs. Driven by the frustration of creating graphs within design applications and inspired by typefaces such as FF Beowolf and FF PicLig, Travis saw an opportunity to take advantage of OpenType technology to simplify the process. Using OpenType ligatures, strings of numbers are automatically transformed into charts. The data remains in a text box, allowing for easy updates and styling. It’s really easy to use; you just type a simple series of numbers like: ‘10+13+37+40’, turn on Stylistic Alternates or Stylistic Set 1 and a graph is automatically created.’ (via Simon)
  (tags: ligatures via:sboyle fonts hacks charts dataviz ui)

• McGarr Solicitors’ sternly-worded letter to Newspaper Licencing Ireland Ltd : In response to a letter received by a charity, warning of dire penalties for ‘reproducing copyright content without permission’, since doing so ‘is theft’. It gets better, since in correspondence they were then informed that “a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website”. Looking forward to seeing how this one plays out…
  (tags: law ireland scams shakedown copyright nli licensing linking hyperlinks)

• Goodbye, CouchDB : ‘From most model-using code, using [Percona] MySQL looks exactly the same as using CouchDB did. Except it’s faster, and the DB basically never fails.’
  (tags: couchdb mysql nosql databases storage percona via:peakscale)

• Diageo Screw BrewDog : Giant booze multinational screws tiny Scottish microbrewery. “Diageo (the main sponsor) approached us at the start of the meal and said under no circumstances could the award be given to BrewDog. They said if this happened they would pull their sponsorship from all future BII events and their representatives would not present any of the awards on the evening. We were as gobsmacked as you by Diageo’s behaviour. We made the wrong decision under extreme pressure. We were blackmailed and bullied by Diageo. We should have stuck to our guns and gave the award to BrewDog.”
  (tags: brewdog diageo bii awards beer brewing dirty-tricks)

• My Mexican Shop.ie : the Irish rendition of Mexican food has long been legendarily terrible, but this new web shop offers a fantastic range of authentic Mexican food ingredients, especially all those chilies you just can’t get here
  (tags: chili food mexican spices cooking shop)

• UK Channel 4 News Demo – Contactless Payment Cards – viaForensics : ‘During an interview with the Channel 4 correspondent we were able to touch his wallet with an Android phone while he was distracted and capture his credit card details.’ … ‘viaForensics found that there are many cards in circulation, including recently issued cards, which are giving up the full card number, expiry, surname and initials.’ Barclays security fail hits the headlines (via Tony Finch)
  (tags: channel-4 news barclays-bank uk banking nfc wireless android via-forensics contactless-cards via:fanf)

• The lessons I learnt from my iPhone mugging | Benjamin Cohen on Technology : some good tips on iPhone security settings, in particular disabling the ability to turn off location services via Restrictions. I should do this
  (tags: crime iphone location london mugging phones security theft)

• Spam-erican Apparel : ‘LifeSphere currently offers more than 90,000 unique products and is more than likely run by one person in a suburban bungalow in Phoenix. As far as I can gather their process consists of ALPHABETICALLY(!) applying every single image in the Public Domain photography archive to every object Zazzle offers. Amazingly almost everything they make is amazing. From doggy clothes featuring macrophotography of Chex Mix, to “Thanksgiving Shrimp” skateboard decks, LifeSphere proves 90,000 times over that rigorous process-based design yields infallibly fresh results.’ (via Nelson)
  (tags: bots clothing design manufacturing zazzle on-demand spam new-aesthetic future)

• Probabilistic Data Structures for Web Analytics and Data Mining « Highly Scalable Blog : Stream summary, count-min sketches, loglog counting, linear counters. Some nifty algorithms for probabilistic estimation of element frequencies and data-set cardinality (via proggit)
  (tags: via:proggit algorithms probability probabilistic count-min stream-summary loglog-counting linear-counting estimation big-data)

• On The Record: Forging a future for the music industry : The original article is now paywalled, but the comments thread contains a fantastic discussion between some very smart young, and old, musicians, discussing music in a digital age where copying is trivial, the future of the music business, copyright, etc.
  (tags: music-business bill-whelan music mp3 copyright on-the-record irish-times)

• InfoQ: Lock-free Algorithms : Michael Barker and Martin Thompson’s talk at the last QCon on the LMAX Disruptor, and other nifty lock-free techniques and patterns. ‘Martin Thompson and Michael Barker explain how Intel x86_64 processors and their memory model work, along with low-level techniques that help creating lock-free software.’
  (tags: lock-free locking mutexes algorithms lmax disruptor infoq slides presentations qcon java)

• Don’t discount the value of price comparison sites – The Irish Times : Conor Pope recommends home-saver.ie and bonkers.ie for insurance and utilities price comparison. I’ve used the latter, with great results
  (tags: price-comparison ireland shopping utilities competition phone irish-times consumer)

• Cubism.js : ‘a D3 plugin for visualizing time series. Use Cubism to construct better realtime dashboards.’ Apache-licensed; nice realtime update style; overlays multiple data sources well. I think I now have a good use-case for this
  (tags: javascript library visualization dataviz tsd data apache open-source)

• First Music Contact – Music3.0 : ‘We talk a lot about what the world of music and artists will look like five or ten years from now. But for changes to happen then, the conversations need to happen now. We believe that the next big thing in music is not going to ever appear on a stage. After the record industry (music 1.0) and the live music industry (music 2.0), it’s time to pay more attention to innovation (music 3.0) and what can come from constructively disrupting how the music industry operates. It’s time to open up the shop. It’s time for unvested interests to see if they can use existing data and ecosystems to make a better music business. For far too long, music has been a conservative sector which views the influence of outside forces with abject suspicion and rank horror. Chalk this down to some bad experiences over the last 15 years due to misunderstandings with and ignorance of the tech and telecoms worlds. Chalk this down to rampant music industry egos which lead folks to believe no-one else can sell music bar music players. Chalk it down to fear of disruption. So, it’s time for change. You can’t keep doing the same things in the same way and hope you won’t make the same mistakes again. It’s time to listen to and learn from smart people in other areas. It’s time for people who have innovative ideas or even just the stirrings of innovative ideas to take stock from people who operate in other areas and who deal with ideas, technology and the valuable currency of innovation every single working day. It’s time for some different talking which is going to lead to some very different make-and-do experiences.’ Looks excellent. (via Jim Carroll)
  (tags: music future technology internet disruption music-industry ireland via:jimcarroll)

• A Kiva success story : Pretty cool testimonial to Kiva’s effects on the ground. ‘Thanks to Mariano’s entrepreneurship and skills, and partially to the [microfinance] loans offered to him, as he said: now, his children are attending to school, something his generation couldn’t afford to, and he is able to save some money for his retirement as he won’t have any pension when that moment comes.’ plus, I liked this detail: ‘Meeting Mariano was funny, because at the beginning he was not convinced we were not there from the lending organization to check on him.’ (via Eoin)
  (tags: kiva microfinance loans developing-world peru small-world)

• Scale Something: How Draw Something rode its rocket ship of growth : Membase, surprise answer. In general it sounds like they had a pretty crazy time — rebuilding the plane in flight even more than usual. “This had us on our toes and working 24 hours a day. I think at one point we were up for around 60-plus hours straight, never leaving the computer. We had to scale out web servers using DNS load balancing, we had to get multiple HAProxies, break tables off MySQL to their own databases, transparently shard tables, and more. This was all being done on demand, live, and usually in the middle of the night. We were very lucky that most of our layers were scalable with little or no major modifications needed. Helping us along the way was our very detailed custom server monitoring tools which allowed us to keep a very close eye on load, memory, and even provided real time usage stats on the game which helped with capacity planning. We eventually ended up with easy to launch “clusters” of our app that included NGINX, HAProxy, and Goliath servers all of which independent of everything else and when launched, increased our capacity by a constant. At this point our drawings per second were in the thousands, and traffic that looked huge a week ago was just a small bump on the current graphs.”
  (tags: scale scalability draw-something games haproxy mysql membase couchbase)

• Scaling: It’s Not What It Used To Be : skamille’s top 5 scaling apps. “1. Redis. I was at a NoSQL meetup last night when someone asked “if you could put a million dollars behind one of the solutions presented here tonight, which one would you choose?” And the answer that one of the participants gave was “None of the above. I would choose Redis. Everyone uses one of these products and Redis.” 2. Nginx. Your ops team probably already loves it. It’s simple, it scales fabulously, and you don’t have to be a programmer to understand how to run it. 3. HAProxy. Because if you’re going to have hundreds or thousands of servers, you’d better have good load balancing. 4. Memcached. Redis can act as a cache but using a real caching product for such a purpose is probably a better call. And finally: 5. Cloud hardware. Imagine trying to grow out to millions of users if you had to buy, install, and admin every piece of hardware you would need to do such a thing.”
  (tags: scaling nginx memcached haproxy redis)

• Clay Shirky Q&A: online creativity and intellectual property | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk : Good discussion and some great points, particularly this one for pro-copyright comments from “creative class” types: “there are few absolutes in copyright. To the question of motivation, if no copyright equaled no work, the fashion business would collapse, as their products are not covered by copyright. Money is one form of reward, but there are others (many non-fiction authors make more money doing things ancillary to their writing than they do from the writing, and then there is the explosion in labors of love), and copyright is one way to arrange the flow of money, but it’s a less good one than it used to be, because we are in an environment that makes that model of control less salient, and the other forms of reward moreso. So the logic of “It’s copyright or chaos” isn’t holding up well.”
  (tags: copyright clay-shirky the-guardian creative-commons fashion)

• Sci-Fi Short Story: ‘Press Enter to Execute’ : a short story about a spam assassin. (via Lee Maguire)
  (tags: scifi spamassassin anti-spam spam via:lee-maguire whoa fiction short-stories)